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Death

Blue Ring

i dont really know where to post this because i never started a journal, but after about 4 months my first octopus died today. its sad, but i consider the overall experience a large success. it was about a foot long when i got it, and in the 4 months it had doubled in size. it hadnt eaten for a week or two, ,and had been very pale towards the end, and today i found it dead on the floor.

it had never displayed any escape behavior before, and rarely even touched the water line. it was positioned right next to my sump, and facing in the opposite direction, so it seems that it didnt make alot of effort to get back in the tank, or to explore my room which is kind of weird. as though it managed to escape (i still dont know how) and then just sat there and waited to die. because it hadnt eaten for so long i was very prepared for it, when i finished work on my last day of shift i was expecting it to die while i was on my break (6 days), so it wasnt a surprise at all.

i didnt expect to find it outside the tank though, given that even when id left the lid off and moved away and watched to see what it would do for minutes it never even approached the opening. my father even left the lid off overnight once when i was out of town and it was just sleeping in the tank.

tonight or tomorrow i will contact a collector about getting another because my tank seems extremely bare without it. i had wanted to keep a journal on it but i named it after something one of my nieces said, which was also the name of someone elses octopus (octopus prime), so i decided to avoid confusion id wait until my next one.

TONMO Supporter

Sorry to hear about your octo. One of the talks at TONMOCON III mentioned that male GPOs will sometimes crawl out of the water at the ends of their lives, perhaps the species you had was prone to the same thing. RIP

Cthulhu

I see Monty beat me to mentioning Jim's talk (with more on the subject in his book, Super Suckers) including odd out of water behavior by senescing male GPO's.

Please journal your next ceph, even if species and name are the same as another. As I am sure you have already found, keeping a record of behavior, interaction and general observations is very helpful to all other keepers and is a great reference for remembering sequences and timing.